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Polished and Upbeat, Romney Tries to Connect

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Mitt Romney loves the word “great.” As in, “Have a great day,” “Things are going great,” “I’m feeling great.” Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, also looks great, sounds great and smells great, like shaving cream. Everyone who asks him something gets a “Thanks, great question.”

That includes Steven Faux of Clive, Iowa, who attended a recent “Ask Mitt Anything” event. In a halting cadence, Mr. Faux (pronounced “Fox”) explained that his 26-year-old son, an Army National Guardsman, was about to leave for Iraq.

If Mr. Romney was feeling the man’s pain, he was not inclined to say so. Instead, he gave the requisite thanks for the son’s service, and then jumped into a rat-a-tat-tat litany of his Iraq talking points: He hails the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He acknowledges that the United States was “underprepared” for its aftermath. Heattacks Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, for saying the war was “lost.”

After eight minutes, Mr. Romney concluded, “Thanks, great question,” and moved on.

Mr. Faux sat with his arms folded. “Sort of a stock response,” he complained later in an interview.

By any measure, Mr. Romney, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is a master pitchman and presenter, bred in politics (his father, George, was the governor of Michigan), enriched in business and battle-tested in the Republican pariah colony of Massachusetts. He is relentlessly upbeat (“I’m feeling incredibly optimistic about our future,” he says at campaign events.) His polished “presidential bearing” has been marveled upon, a package of great hair, sleek suits and dreamy smiles well matched to podiums and magazine covers.

But can he connect with voters? While he is climbing in the polls, some people who have seen him close up at recent events describe him as impressive but somewhat detached. He struggles at times to convey a sense that he is an accessible mortal — that he can be spontaneous, that he bears scars and can appreciate at gut-level the struggles of ordinary Americans.

“He doesn’t really seem to be like the rest of us,” said Denis Joyal, a machinist from Belmont, N. H., who heard Mr. Romney at an American Legion hall in Alton, N.H. He called the candidate “sort of high-class” and “a little too perfect.”

Mr. Romney, a 60-year-old Harvard law and business school graduate, former venture capitalist worth nearly $350 million andclean-living teetotaler with a weakness for Vanilla Coke, is operating in a political environment in which candidates are expected to prove they are “regular” people, fit to be neighbors as well as presidents. It is not enough for a candidate to have command of issues, or a stage, or a camera — he must give voters a sense of everyday kinship.

This is something of a challenge for Mr. Romney, derided in some unfriendly circles as “Governor Perfect,” a term he chuckles at and flatly rejects. “That’s not something that people who know me well would suggest is the right handle,” he said in an interview. “I have plenty of weaknesses, plenty of failings.”

His supporters say that the impression that Mr. Romney does not connect with voters is a temporary problem, if it is one at all. “I have heard those comments from people,” said Tom Rath, a former New Hampshire attorney general and longtime Republican supporter in the state who is serving as a senior adviser to Mr. Romney’s campaign.

“Of all the problems for a candidate to have, it’s not a bad one,” said Mr. Rath, adding that as Mr. Romney becomes better known, he will become more accessible, and likable, to voters. “I don’t think this is a problem we won’t be able to overcome.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign enterprise somewhat resembles the “roadshow” that precedes an initial public stock offering. That is the intense period in which a chief executive and his top people barnstorm the country pitching their soon-to-be-public company and its stock to exclusive groups of big institutional investors. As a general rule, the roadshow is not a time for the head of a company or would-be head of a country to volunteer vulnerabilities.

Unlike some other politicians, Mr. Romney is not prone to unburdening himself of his life’s travails on the stump.

At a speech to an insurance company in Dover, N.H., Mr. Romney was asked about stem-cell research by Karen Olivier, of Epping, who like Ann Romney suffers from multiple sclerosis. “I have a personal interest in this, as does your wife,” Mrs. Olivier added.

Mr. Romney ignored the opening about his wife and gave a lengthy version of his standard stem-cell speech. “Thanks, great question,” he said, wrapping up.

Photo

Mitt Romney at a lunch in Des Moines. Some people who have seen him close up at events describe him as impressive but somewhat detached.Credit
Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Mr. Romney does not like to digress. He talks fast, walks fast through a crowd and moves fast from one question to another. He is loath to get off point or behind schedule. There is a definite “master of the universe” flavor to his campaign.

He travels with an entourage that includes two or three “operations” guys who serve as advance men and a security detail. (Between stops in New Hampshire, this reporter found himself trailing the former governor’s S.U.V. on a back road, only to be led to the shoulder and instructed to “veer off” by a man wearing an earpiece who emerged from Mr. Romney’s car. “We ran your license plate,” he told the reporter, and explained that no one was permitted to follow Mr. Romney’s vehicle.)

The operations guys are ready to assist with any unpleasantness, like the people who keep showing up at Mr. Romney’s events dressed as a dolphin named Flipper to highlight the candidate’s so-called flip-flops on issues. (Two Flippers stood outside Mr. Romney’s event in West Des Moines. One held a “Señor Flipper” sign, presumably to appeal to Spanish-speaking voters or dolphins.) In Laconia, N. H., Flipper was accused of creating a disturbance and was ushered out of the hall by Mr. Romney’s staff members during his speech.

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At a high school in Alton, Mr. Romney addressed about 500 students who exhibited a most un-Romneylike assortment of hair colors and lip-piercings. He introduced Matt Lauer of NBC, who was trailing Mr. Romney with a “Today” show crew. As Mr. Lauer walked on stage to loud applause, Mr. Romney mentioned that he recently came across a magazine promoting Mr. Lauer as having “the best bod in a bathing suit” among morning TV hosts.

The students whooped.

Mr. Lauer took the microphone from Mr. Romney, turned to the audience and asked, “Did he connect with you today?”

The reaction was more subdued.

Before leaving, Mr. Romney reasserted his “enormous faith in the American people,” in keeping with his determined optimism.While all candidates like to exude a sense of hope (“I’m pessimistic” is not something winning candidates typically say), Mr. Romney takes it up a notch, or 10. To inhabit his circuit is to visit something akin to a Political Oz, with “Beautiful Day” by U2 blaring over loudspeakers and a permasmiling candidate whose deep, cockpit-ready voice would reassure any cabin full of fliers during heavy turbulence.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” Mr. Romney marveledin New Hampshire upon seeing a Boston television reporter, Jon Keller.

“Isn’t every day like that in Romney World?” Mr. Keller wisecracked.

While buoyant, Mr. Romney is hardly freewheeling and leaves little to instinct. “Some people go with the gut feel, but that’s not the school I come from,” Mr. Romney said in an interview. “I believe in being highly analytical and deliberative in making decisions.”

In Alton, a student asked him whom he considered to be his chief competition in the race for the Republican nomination.

“Me,” Mr. Romney said. “I don’t want to mess this up somehow, to knock myself off this stage.” The remark conjures the experience of his father, whose 1968 presidential campaign imploded over an ill-considered comment that American generals had “brainwashed” him into supporting the war in Vietnam.

Mr. Romney says the self-destruction of his father’s campaign is “probably not that applicable to today.” But he goes on to enumerate the importance of candidate discipline, now more than ever.

“Running for president in the YouTube era, you realize you have to be very judicious in what you say,” Mr. Romney said. “You have to be careful with your humor. You have to recognize that anytime you’re running for the presidency of the United States, you’re on.”

This is something of a notable admission from Mr. Romney, that he is “on” all the time and has no intention of letting down his fabulous hair in public. But the beauty of a long presidential campaign is that only so much can be scripted and controlled. Inevitably, some unwelcome reality will intrude, and the candidate may reveal himself in an unguarded moment. Or not.

On a perfect cloudless morning,the candidate stepped into a cafe and bakery in Dover, N.H., past an assortment of wedding cakes in the window, white as his teeth. He encountered an elderly man at the counter who promptly disparaged his Mormon religion.